‘Tilli’ was living in Hamburg when war broke out. She began writing letters, which she could not post, to her children abroad, including her daughter Ruth in Wales. They were discovered in the 1970s, translated and published – at which time they were serialised in the Observer and on Womans’s Hour, and Tilli was the subject of a television documentary starring Margaret Tyzack.
On the Other Side provides an essential counterpoint to Few Eggs and No
Oranges as it describes Tilli’s struggle to keep her household going, to survive physically and emotionally during the Allied bombing raids, and to retain her civilised, Anglophile values as she watches ‘the Führer’s blind lust for conquest’ destroy her country. ‘If you want to know what it was like to be a civilian in wartime Germany you must read this marvellous book,’ wrote Timothy Garton Ash in the Spectator in 1979.
PREFACE BY RUTH EVANS AFTERWORD BY CHRISTOPHER BEAUMAN
On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germany 1940–46
MATHILDE WOLFF-MÖNCKEBERG
The endpaper is a wall-hanging woven by Anni Albers 1926
PERSEPHONE BOOKS CATALOGUE
NO 75
232pp PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 9781903155653